18 January 1999: Quiet Weekend

Monday, 18 January 1999:

Quiet Weekend

So my weekend ended up being pretty mellow all the way through. I slept 'til about 10 am yesterday, and when I woke up I went and grabbed the newspaper, and Städte und Ritter and Falling and read them all in bed. Finally got up and put on a few jazz albums, until I realized that the NFL Championship games were on, so I turned those on instead.

The Vikings/Falcons game was sort of comic/tragic, in that the Vikings simply refused to make the moves to put the game away. Coach Denny Green is one of the bigger head cases among NFL coaches as far as I can tell, and I think it finally caught up to them yesterday. The Falcons probably shouldn't have even been in that game, but they won it in overtime. Strange.

The Denver/Jets game was almost as strange, with a host of turnovers, and John Elway finally waking up and moving the offense in the third quarter (score at halftime was 3-0 Jets). If the Broncos don't shake it off, I think the Falcons have a chance to win the Super Bowl.

I also baked myself a cake yesterday, as I suggested I'd do. It's a french (?) chocolate cake, a recipe my Mom gave me a few years ago, and it's pretty easy to make, although beating the egg whites is kind of a pain, and I just don't have the touch to make the chocolate/butter frosting, but it always turns out okay anyway.

After making it I went over to Karen's. She's been laid low for several days with some sort of ear or sinus infection, and she seemed pretty down yesterday. Chocolate cake usually fixes that, so she made tea and we sat and talked for a while. It's nice to have friends to hang out with like that.

What else have I been doing? Umm, catching up on Homicide re-runs, and finishing watching my tape of The Martian Chronicles, which is a little cheesier than I'd remembered, but really not very much. Bradbury's original stories are not models of tight storytelling, and the muddiness in the TV series compares reasonably well.

One thing that struck me while watching the tape was how Rock Hudson seemed to share some similarities to William Shatner in his original Star Trek days, and Bruce Boxleitner of Babylon 5: All three are good-looking "leading man" types, cut from a heroic mold. Hudson, though, seems clearly to be the best actor of the three, and it's kind of a shame that he was never cast in such an SF series. It could have been interesting. (Rock Hudson as James T. Kirk?)

Did I mention that I bought a thing of cat grass for the guys a few days ago? They sure like it, even if they do leave stalks of it lying around on the floor. At least they don't throw it up. Newton is very weird, though: He was having fun last night - after I'd gone to bed - chewing up the plastic container it came in, and making a lot of noise doing it. I finally went out, picked him up, said "That's enough of that, you!", carried him into my bedroom, threw him under the covers, and went back to bed. He crawled around for a bit, and finally tried to get out, while I held him tightly. The funniest thing about this is that while he was scrabbling to escape, he was purring. Either he wasn't sure what he wanted, or he just thought it was another fun game. Bizarre animal.

(Newton likes to climb under my covers of his own volition, so this wasn't a cruel trick I was playing. Jefferson does not much care to be under covers like that.)

Today was a fairly big meeting day at work. I don't have many of those, thankfully. Otherwise, it was an unremarkable day.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)